Nikolaos Adamou wrote:Γραμματικὴ ἐστιν ἐμπειρία τῶν παρὰ ποηταῖς τε καὶ συγγραφεῦσιν ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ λεγομένων. Μέρη δὲ αὐτῆς εἰσὶν ἕξ. πρῶτον ἀνάγνωσις ἐντριβὴς κατὰ προσῳδίαν, δεύτερον ἐξήγησις, μετὰ τοὺς ἐνυπάρχοντας ποιητικοὺς τρόπους, τρίτον γλωσςῶνς τὲ καὶ ἱστοριῶν πρόχειρος ἀπόδοσις, τέταρτον ἐτυμολογίας εὕρεσις, πέμπτον ἀναλογίας ἐκλογισμὸς, ἕκτον κρίσις ποιημάτων, ὅ δη κάλλιστόν ἐστι πάντων ἐν τῇ τέχνῃ.Grammar is empirical (knowledge) (of the general usage) of poets and prose writers (ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ λεγομένων). It has six divisions, first expert (reading) with due regard to prosodic features; second explanation of the literary expressions found in the text; third, the provision of notes on particular words and on the subject matter; fourth, the discovery of etymologies’ fifth, the working out of grammatical regularities; sixth, the critical appreciation of literature, which is the finest part of all that the (science τέχνῃ) embraces. As I take the translation from the Byzantine Grammarians, by Robert Henry Robins, page 44, I do have problems with the translation, and definitely ἀνάγνωσις is not just reading but aloud reading.

But the guy's name is really Dyscolus, not Dyscholus. Dyscolus (Δύσκολος).The name really doesn't mean, as the spelling "Dyscholus" might seem to suggest, "trained in the school of hard knocks" or "knuckle-rapping schoolmaster" but "hard to get along with." Its opposite is εὔκολος, a word that I remember from Aristophanes' Frogs and the assertion there that Sophocles, unlike the quarreling Aeschylus and Euripides, was "sweet-tempered" both in life and in the underworld.

I don't know what it is about some of those Hellenistic literary figures but they've had some weird names. An associate of mine once wrote a book on Dionysius Skytobrachion (Σκυτοβραχίων), the "leather-armed."

Schmidhauser's work is quite good. I'm looking forward to his published work on the Apollonius' treatise on the pronoun and that chapter from Bakker (2010) is one of the better ones in that volume--most of which are excellent, but there are a few duds (the syntax chapter was a huge letdown).

Mike AubreyCanada Institute of Linguistics & Trinity Western University Graduate School